Use of Gene Therapy to Cure Aids

According to WHO survey in 2010 there are 34 million people who are infected with HIV and attained AIDS. Per year about 1.8 million people dies with AIDS and 2.7 million new people become infected with HIV. AIDS is a secondary immunodeficiency caused by HIV virus that belongs to retroviral family. During AIDS T-cell count in blood falls tremendously below 200 cells ìl ̄ that results to be fatal in about 2-3 years. HIV can be transmitted from one person to another by unprotected homosexual or heterosexual sex, by transfusion of blood infected with HIV, by needle sharing between drug or steroid abusers, from mother to child during childbirth or during breast feeding and presence of sexually transmitted diseases (STDs) increase the threat of HIV infection. During AIDS many opportunistic infections and other immune deficiencies occur frequently that usually have negligible chances to affect a normal healthy person. It was found in Berlin patient of HIV, who was living on HAART, was transplanted with bone marrow from a person who was homozygous for CCR5Ä32bp deletion i.e. deletion of one base pair on 32 position in CCR5 gene after which patient became resistant to HIV infection. He discontinued the HAART therapy and lived like a normal person. Viral particles and viral reservoirs were vanished from his blood. This observation laid the basis for use of gene therapy against AIDS. By modifying stem cells taken from bone marrow in which using gene therapy genes for disrupted CCR5 were inserted in place of normal CCR5 gene and then the cells were re-implanted in bone marrow after which they started producing HIV resistant blood cells. Another observation was that modifying stem cells to produce interfering RNAs like sense RNA, antisense RNA, ribozymes that interfere in viral replication cycle or host cell function that is required for viral replication also provided good results to produce anti-HIV immune system. Like HAART in which combination of many drugs are used in similar way if many anti-HIV genes are used simultaneously to modify stem cells targeting different point in viral life cycle provide better results than results acquired by use of single anti-HIV gene to eradicate HIV infection. Although gene therapy provided good results against HIV infection but it is still in trial stage and have not been used on humans yet.